Astronaut Or Astronot: Totally Giving Away A Power Supply

August 1, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

Hey! It’s time for another round of Astronaut or Astronot, where we try to give away a jumbo power supply to someone on hackaday.io if they have voted in the most recent community voting round.

Before I get around to telling you who won, we need to go over the criticism of the current voting scheme. There’s a lot of valid criticism out there about how the algorithm that presents projects to the voting page is broken. Yes, it weights projects so some are seen more often than others. And yes, it can be frustrating. However, the results of the voting have no bearing on The Hackaday Prize (the space thing), and the purpose of the entire community voting is to get people looking at the projects, give away t-shirts to the project creators and 3D printers, o-scopes, and power supplies to random people who have voted. We listened to your suggestions and we’re tweaking the algorithm that presents projects for the next round of voting. That starts Monday, we’re doing the drawing on Wednesday, and votes don’t carry over from round to round.

With that out of the way, it’s time to do the whole ‘pick a random person on hackaday.io and see if they voted’ thing. For this week’s lottery, I chose five random people on the site, hoping I wouldn’t go through all of them before giving away a nice bench power supply. The first person, [in3rtial], didn’t vote. You just lost out on a really cool prize there, man.

The second person randomly selected was [tyler]. He voted a total of six times this round. I voted fifty times, but we’re not picky. That means he wins a nice power supply. Everyone go congratulate him for living somewhere that’s cheap to ship a power supply to.

That’s it for this round of Astronaut or Astronot. We’ll have a new round of voting up on Monday. For a change of pace (and because we’re going to be at DEFCON at this time next week), ~~we’re going to do the drawing on Wednesday~~ nevermind, we’re totally doing the drawing from DEFCON. Oh, and if you haven’t, you might want to submit a project to The Hackaday Prize. There’s still time, and your odds of winning something are really, really good.

Laser Projected Christmas Lights

August 1, 2014 by Bryan Cockfield 30 Comments

It’s August, and of course that means that it’s time for retail stores to put up their Christmas decorations! But seriously, if you’re going to do better than the neighbors you need to start now. [Joey] already has his early start on the decorations, with a house-sized light show using LED strips and a laser projector that he built last Christmas.

What started off as a thought that it would be nice to hang a wreath over the garage soon turned into a laser projector that shows holiday-themed animations on the front of the house. The project also includes a few RGB LED strips which can match the colors displayed by the projector. The LEDs are powered from a custom-built supply that is controlled by a laptop, and the program that runs on the computer averages the colors from the video signal going to the projector which lights up the LED strips to match the projected image. This creates an interesting effect similar to some projects that feature home theater ambient lighting.

The only major problem [Joey] came across was having to account for the lasers’ motion in the projected patterns, which was causing the computer to read false values. This and a few other laser-related quirks were taken care of with a bit of programming to make sure the system was functioning properly. After that it was a simple matter of attaching the projector to the roof and zip-tying the LED strips to the eaves of the house.

The projector is weatherproof, has survived one harsh winter already, and can be up and running for any holiday. With Halloween right around the corner, this could be a great way to spice up some trick-or-treating. Check out the video after the break to see this setup in action.

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Fischertechnik CNC Machine Looks Innocent Whilst Cutting Your Face

August 1, 2014 by Rich Bremer 6 Comments

FischerTechnik + Arduino CNC Milling Machine

Hallo iedereen! All the way from the Netherlands comes this fairly unique CNC milling machine built by a handful of Mechanical Engineering students over at the Delft University of Technology. These guys only had one week to build the mill in order to fulfill a requirement of their Mechtronics class. Unfortunately, directly after showing the machine worked, it had to be disassembled.

If the frame looks a little toy-ish, it’s because it is. This particular system is called Fischertechnik and the main support beams are similar to that of aluminum extrusion (ex 80/20, Misumi) except that it is made from nylon. Notice the extremely long cutting bit and comparatively abnormal large Z axis travel capability. What this system lacks in rigidity is made up by being able to carve a very 3D shape with steep sides without the machine hitting the work piece. The loss of rigidity was totally acceptable since the team was only planning on cutting foam and the project’s purpose was to learn mechanics and automation.

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Electricity Monitoring With A Light-to-Voltage Sensor, MQTT And Some Duct Tape

August 1, 2014 by Matt Terndrup 25 Comments

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When it comes down to energy management, having real-time data is key. But rarely is up-to-the-minute kilowatt hour information given out freely by a Utility company, which makes it extremely hard to adjust spending habits during the billing cycle. So when we heard about [Jon]’s project to translate light signals radiating out of his meter, we had to check it out.

From the looks of it, his hardware configuration is relatively simple. All it uses is a TSL261 Light-to-Voltage sensor connected to an Arduino with an Ethernet shield attached. The sensor is then taped above the meter’s flashing LED, which flickers whenever a pulse is sent out indicating every time a watt of electricity is used. His configuration is specific to the type of meter that was installed by his Utility, and there is no guarantee that all the meters deployed by that company are the same. But it is a good start towards a better energy monitoring solution.

And the entire process is documented on [Jon]’s website, allowing for more energy-curious people to see what it took to get it all hooked up. In it, he describes how to get started with MQTT, which is a machine-to-machine (M2M)/”Internet of Things” connectivity protocol, to produce a real-time graph, streaming data in from a live feed.

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